Wednesday has been unpacking and sanitary-wiping incoming parcels
What I read
Finished Ellis, Masculinity and Science in Britain, 1831-1918, and makes a case that really, up until the Great War, when the military applications of SCIENCE proved their manly credentials, there was a constant murmur of dubiousness about the proper masculinity of nerdy scientist bods - lurking solitary and speculative, and even if they started to go out into the world and socialise together, somehow were perceived as doin it RONG and probably to attract wymmyn, if not being somehow effeminate themselves... Not to mention in-fighting between different groups of scientists, sometimes on a generational basis.
There was a Literary Review winter double issue.
Months ago I started Chiara Beccalossi's Female Sexual Inversion: Same-Sex Desires in Italian and British Sexology, c. 1870-1920 (2011) (yet another Palgrave Macmillan cybersale item) and put it to one side, and picked it up again. There's quite a lot there generally on medicine and psychiatry and other specialisms and their status in post-Risorgimento Italy - a v different setting to the UK - but anyway, it led to a fairly explicit, if also quite complex (or maybe just confused), discourse on female same-sex desires. Whereas the discourse in British medicine remained evasive and muted: I had a few quibbles (including what I thought was a bit of a misreading of what I was actually doing in one of my articles) with what she was saying on the UK side. I also think one has to ask what would have been the response to Ellis's Sexual Inversion if it hadn't become the subject of a cause celebre prosecution, which was not at all inevitable, and how far the medprof were doing careful dissociation because of that.
I broke off part-way in reading this to re-read Rumer Godden, In This House of Brede (1969), as a result of watching the movie of The Nun's Story (realised that reading the book, many years ago, I did not really consider the whole Belgium/Congo colonialist context! - in particular the old doc at the Tropical Diseases Institute who was 'there in the early days'....). Anyway, this still held up: for one thing, it avoids some of Godden's recurrent tropes, and while there are a few things one might cavil at, it works. (I was wondering about the RC Ethiopians, but apparently there is an Ethiopian Catholic Church as well as the ancient Coptic branch of Christianity practised since Time Immemorial.)
On the go
Well, Susan Chitty, Playing the Game: A Biography of Sir Henry Newbolt (1997) has arrived and I've started it. The copy has a fair amount of underlining and scribbled annotations - ? a review copy. Not entirely taken with the style, but the material is interesting so far.
Up next
No idea. No sign of the things I have on order.
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